Thursday, May 4, 2017

Digital Intensive - Google Docs and Drive

I am very grateful to have been given the opportunity to attend the Digital Intensive course every Friday in Term 2. We will be looking at lots of different tools we can use to enhance our teaching.

Today we focused on Google Docs, Google Drive and we looked at Hapara Teacher Dashboard.

Did you know that you are able to comment on a students' piece of writing via Talk & Comment. Rather than typing out your message to the student you are able to voice record a message that they are able to listen to on their learning device. You are also able to use this tool to leave instructions on a document to make the learning rewindable.

The John Davies Word Cloud is an online app which you can use several different ways, it takes the keywords out of a piece of text and makes them bigger than the rest of the words. (Photo on the left). We looked at several extensions and add-ons that we can use to assist our teaching for eg. Grammarly, Easy Accents, Select & Speak and Docutube etc.

We then looked at Hapara - Teacher Dashboard and how we can better our knowledge and understanding around the site. I teach in a Modern Learning Environment where we have 60 children and 2 teachers, today I learned that I am able to create groups for students to be put in to make it easier when having different learning groups during the day.

There are some tools that work really well for the students, ourselves and then there are several tools that work for both the children and myself. Below you'll see a Venn Diagram of these tools.

2 comments:

Great to have you in the group Zac. I am interested in whether you think the Voice function (both in docs for typing and in the extension you mention for comments) are useful in your space. Give it a try and some feedback next week :)

Love what you are talking about Zac! Today has also given me alot of insight into tools I can be using, along with how I should be setting my blog up. The flow of your posts is excellent and I love how Multi Modal your set up is. Teach to comment is a tool I think we will both find exceptionally beneficial. Keep up the good work!